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You make some interesting points here. I actually taught a class recently on HF and the various controversies surrounding it, primarily those pertaining to race and religion. By and large my students were white and thoroughly inculcated with liberal guilt, but we did still manage to have some productive discussions about race, institutional authority, language, etc. Several students actually started out arguing the typical public school line that Twain was a horrible racist, but changed their arguments when they got into the actual facts for the research paper.

One book several of them found useful, and which you might also like, is The Jim Dilemma by Jocelyn Chadwick-Joshua. She's a black scholar and educator who has conducted many pedagogical seminars on the book and why she thinks it should be taught, uncomfortably accurate vocabulary and all.

I was a big boy of twenty-six by the time I got around to reading it. I daresay I found it educational. Huck spends the entire trip wrestling with his conscience. At first thinking he’s doomed himself to hell for helping to “steal” his aunt’s “property.” Then, as Our Heros go through their various adventures together, he comes to see Jim more and more as a fully qualified human being (like when Jim tells him the heartbreaking story of how he found out his little daughter had been rendered deaf by scarlet fever), with the natural right to breathe free. Finally, he realizes it is his duty to help his friend escape.

The chapters dealing with his drunken, no-good “Pap” also include probably the most vivid description of the alcoholic delerium tremens in the english language.

Ooh! Ooh! And don’t forget about those uncomfortably homoerotic passages...